Beyond Reformation?: An Essay on William Langland's Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity by David Aers (review)

David Aers is one of the most important and most prolific scholars of William Langland in the last half-century. To his already formidable array of readings of the many aspects of Piers Plowman, he now adds Beyond Reformation?: An Essay on William Langland's Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity, a concise, impassioned, forcibly argued account of Langland's ecclesiology, which concentrates on the C-version of the poem and on its final passus. "Constantinian Christianity" is a notion that achieved some currency in theological circles in the last century through the work of Anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder. Aers bases his deployment of the term on Langland's four-line comment (ll. C.XVII, ll. 220–24) on the specific tradition of The Donation of Constantine. The Donation of Constantine was a ninth-century forgery purporting to demonstrate that after his conversion Constantine gave his empire to Pope Sylvester, only to have Sylvester grant the temporalia of the empire back to Constantine. Gregorian reformers and subsequent papal advocates used the Donation to support claims of the supremacy of papal authority in relation both to the rest of the clerical hierarchy and to lay rulers. Until its definitive exposure as a forgery by the humanist Lorenzo Valla in 1440, resistance to these claims generally took the form of another narrative detail added to the fabrication, an angel heard on high, crying out, in Langland's version, that the church has "ydronke venym," poisoning all those who have "Petres power."

Aers has almost nothing to say about the Donation per se, choosing instead to characterize Langland's understanding of Constantinian in much broader terms: "To Langland it represents the immersion in the political, coercive, and economic fabric of the social world" (p. xiv). Recoiling at the commodification overtaking the "modern" church (i.e., the church contemporary to Langland), a process of "de-Christianization" within the church led by the friars, the cardinals, and the papacy, Langland yearns for a return to the "Pentecostal" church of primitive Christianity. For Aers, Langland does not intend by this desire a movement toward reform in any ordinary sense. Certainly, there is no question of the Roman church reforming itself. On the contrary, Langland finds the de-Christianizing he witnesses so total and so appalling that it not only invalidates any question of the unbroken succession from Peter proclaimed by medieval popes, but it also calls into question both the intercessionary authority of the church, that is, the power to bind and loose, and sacramental theology itself. This austere, thoroughgoing revulsion resembles the critiques of William of Ockham and John Wyclif, except that, in contrast to Wyclif, Langland rejects any recourse to lay rulers, whom he finds just as corrupt as the church. Instead, Langland envisions a sort of "congregationalism" (p. 160, italics in the original) of the fit but exponentially few, a "tiny remnant" of "foles" or fools (this figure ultimately from Paul, 1 Cor. 1:22–29, invoked by Langland at ll. C.XXII.74–79).

Aers sets himself two goals in this book. The first is to introduce Langland to those not working in the discipline of English. (He does not say so explicitly, but he seems to have in mind particularly theologians and scholars of religion.) The second is to intervene in "Reform Master Narratives" (p. xii; he takes this phrase from Charles Taylor). He mentions a number of works by nonmedievalists, including Charles Taylor, Michael Gillespie, Brad S. Gregory, and Thomas Pfau. But his most direct targets seem to be Eamon Duffy's Stripping the Altars, and James Simpson's Reform and Cultural Revolution. (Curiously, he does not include in this grouping Anne Hudson's Premature Reformation—perhaps because he finds its conclusions more congenial?—though that has had...